Outline of the construction and application of a GFO-based TCM diagnoses ontology for syndrome differentiation of psoriasis vulgaris

Abstract

Psoriasis is a chronic, recurrent, inflammatory skin disease, with varied incidence rates for various populations in different regions of the world. According to statistics, the prevalence of psoriasis in European countries is about 1% ∼ 3%, and 0.47% for China in 2008, which appears on the rise year by year. [1,2] Evidence suggests that genetic and environmental factors play important roles in the pathogenesis of psoriasis [1,2], but its exact etiology and pathogenesis are still unclear. Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) treatment, based on syndrome differentiation, has a long history in treating this disease and achieved a significant effect in practice [3,4]. However, few studies on intelligent knowledge-based system (KBS), based on TCM treatment, for automatic reasoning and semantic retrieval have been reported, but much less for mature products supporting clinical practice. In order to inherit and develop the excellent tradition of TCM, with psoriasis as a use case, a knowledge base of psoriasis disease was tried to be constructed based on TCM Ontology combined with ontology, knowledge base and disease knowledge related to psoriasis in this paper, which can provide references for the construction of a shared and reusable diagnosis knowledge-base for the psoriasis diagnosis system of TCM experts.